The stakeholder management literature provides little empirical knowledge to guide managers who have to make tradeoffs among stakeholders’ interests. We take a first step by studying primary stakeholders’ intention to associate with a firm that treats their own stakeholder group either more or less favorably than another stakeholder group. As primary stakeholders associate voluntarily with the firm, their intention to become one of the firm’s stakeholders is crucial to firm performance. Building on microfoundations borrowed from social psychology and behavioral economics, we show that stakeholders’ degree of other-orientation moderates the direct impact of tradeoffs on stakeholders’ intention to associate with a firm and its indirect impact through trust. Managers can thus expect different reactions to tradeoffs as a function of stakeholders’ degree of other-orientation. These results also call for a new conceptualization of tradeoffs where stakeholders’ interests are not equated with their personal and material wellbeing.
